CEOs Spend Just 3% of Their Time With Customers, Harvard's Nohria Finds

CEOs spend just 3% of their time with customers. That figure comes from Nitin Nohria's landmark 2018 study with economist Michael E. Porter, which tracked chief executives' time in 15-minute increments, 24 hours a day. Three decades of research later, Nohria's verdict is blunt: the demands on CEOs keep piling up, but the job itself hasn't budged.

Nohria knows the corner office better than almost anyone studying it. He served as dean of Harvard Business School and is now executive chairman of Thrive Capital. Since 1997, he has taught the university's invitation-only New CEO Workshop through its executive education arm. Last month he published a new book, The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility.

By Nathan Brooks

Has the CEO role actually changed?

Not really, Nohria argues. Technology, social norms and regulations evolve constantly. The role does not. "The role of the CEO is surprisingly enduring," he says. "It's still to craft a vision for how the company will navigate the moment. It is to select an extraordinary senior team, [and] it is to align the organization [to] allow everybody else to make decisions that you can celebrate."

For practitioners, that's a useful distinction. If the role is stable, then the fix for feeling overwhelmed isn't a new job description. It's better management of the context around you.

Nohria has asked new CEOs the same question for 30 years: what surprised you about the job? The same three answers keep coming back.

• They're unprepared for the reality of always being in the spotlight.
• They realize they can't run the company by making every decision themselves.
• Their packed schedules become even more fragmented.

His prescription for that second surprise is a mindset shift. "I can't outwork this job. And my job is to shape the context where others can make decisions that I celebrate, as opposed to being the person who feels like they are driving the performance of this company," Nohria says.

What has shifted since the pandemic?

The texture of a CEO's week looks a bit different than it did when Nohria and Porter published their time-use research. Since COVID-19, virtual meetings are far more commonplace. Chief executives also find themselves engaging with regulators more than they did a decade ago.

What does this change for the average CEO? Less than you'd think. The structural weaknesses the 2018 research exposed are still there. Customers and frontline employees continue to get short shrift, and Nohria's 3% customer-time figure explains why.

"There are so many demands on a CEO's time that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and these are the two [constituencies] that don't always make demands," he observes. Customers don't book slots on your calendar. Neither do frontline workers. So they lose.

His fix is almost embarrassingly practical. "Put it on your calendar. If it isn't scheduled, the risk that it's going to get lost is very high in a CEO's life," Nohria says. In a job where everything competes for attention, the unscheduled visit is the first casualty.

Can AI fix the CEO calendar?

Artificial intelligence tools are just starting to change how chief executives manage their time, Nohria says. Some CEOs now use tools such as Copilot to analyze their calendars. An AI assistant can flag lopsided time allocation and suggest moving a few things around to make room for more meetings with employees and customers.

"Almost like a little bit of a good chief of staff that's nudging you to do the right thing," he notes. For executives wondering how to act on Nohria's scheduling advice without adding another manual review to their week, this is the emerging answer: let the software catch what the calendar crowds out.

What about CEOs outside corporate America?

Nohria's research base skews toward corporate chief executives, which makes his cameo in Roll the Calls, the autobiography of Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, stand out. Nohria once spent a day and a half advising Emanuel as he weighed merging his Endeavor talent agency with another firm.

Asked about the combustible, argumentative Emanuel, Nohria doesn't reach for a contrast with his usual HBS audience. "He has a constancy and a driven purpose about getting things done, and I've always admired that about him," he says.

His guess at how Emanuel stacks up on the time-use front? "I haven't studied his calendar, but if I had to guess, I think Ari would probably have more meetings in a single day than almost anybody I've studied."

The takeaway for operators

Strip out the noise and Nohria's message to practitioners is simple. The CEO job reduces to three durable tasks: set the vision, pick the senior team, align the organization so others can decide well. Everything else, from regulatory engagement to virtual meeting norms, is context. And the most reliably neglected constituencies, customers and frontline staff, won't reclaim their share of your attention until you schedule them. AI copilots may soon do the nagging for you.